come up for air
by exploding-empires
Summary: The thing they don't tell you about love is that it's a regressive state; a retrograde condition. James learns this the hard way. / JamesVictoire, breaking the rules. Rated T for implied mental disorder.


**a/n**: this is for pairing requests at ngfs and these beautiful prompts were given to me by how i feel. this is also for the 2013 fanfiction olympics being held by colorful swirls on hpfc - i chose to do floor (a song-inspired fic).  
**prompts used**: james/victoire, hospital, death, war, retrograde by james blake  
fall, carry, "i missed you", romance, orange

* * *

**come up for air  
**_james_ + _victoire_

/

suddenly i'm hit  
is this the darkness of the dawn?  
- retrograde, **james blake**

* * *

It feels as natural as magnetism, an invisible force pulling them together in a way that they shouldn't be pulled, destructive but addictive. It moves too fast to keep up with: one decision leading to another, forcing them down a path neither of them knew even existed. It's like a war path, a tornado that will only ever spit in their eyes and dance with their lives.

They're like a drug. He takes one hit and he craves more, he _needs_ more.

He has a lot of bad habits, like his smoking, or his drinking, or the way his hands itch for curvature and blunt lines and crosshatching when he hasn't drawn in a few days. Now, he finds his hands making shapes that he knows they found on Victoire's body, living with the need for her like muscle memory. He has dreams about her name, her name like a prayer, like a tattoo drumming out on his pulse.

James Potter doesn't set out to be a bad guy, really. He likes the reputation, and he likes the attention, but he doesn't like what he does to get there. He doesn't really feel like he's done much to deserve the looks he gets and the reprimands from Rose every time he so much as looks at a girl (although it doesn't matter much, does it, because they're never _her_). But it feels like a normal part of his lifestyle to kiss his cousins, because they're pretty and it's not illegal and technically he could marry her if he wanted to, which he does - but he knows his mother would never forgive him.

He should've guessed that Victoire would be the problem.

/

The thing with Victoire Weasley is that she's almost exclusively perfect. She's absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, of course, but she's also one of the most intelligent people James knows, and she's genuinely sweet.

When she kisses him everything else falls away, and James knows he's in far too deep and he should not be feeling this way because it's much too much like falling in love with his cousin.

"James," she whispers, and it sounds a lot like home.

/

Night after night, he drowns his internal organs in Firewhiskey and pretends he isn't going to dream about her.

/

It's scarily easy to enter into a romantic relationship with your cousin. They lock James' door when she's round, because no matter how much they deny that something's going on, neither of them is ever quite sure how it is going to end when they see each other.

Victoire comes over for a "catch-up", and when James' mother tells him about how glad they all are that he and Victoire are getting closer, his heart sinks a little further, because soon enough their family are bound to find out and that will be the day that James Potter wants to die.

The catch-up lasts pretty platonically, discounting some harmless flirting, until around eight in the evening when James brings out the alcohol and they both get a little bit drunk.

"You know, James, you're very pretty," Victoire says, slurring her words slightly.

"Why, thank you," James says. "Can I kiss you?"

Victoire looks uncertain. "I don't think we should keep doing this, James. We're related."

"I don't care," James says, honestly, and after a moment's hesitation they move together and it's a long kiss and one of the best James has ever had, and he's had more than his fair share. "I like you a lot."

/

It's an argument, but they don't argue. He's angry, but he's mainly just sad, because she's got that face on that means she's confused and she doesn't know what to do and she's upset.

"I just don't know what - what we are," he says, and he can't look at her because he _will_ start to cry, and James Potter doesn't do that. Instead, he takes out a cigarette to distract his hands from shaking. He hasn't had anything to drink yet today. "And I don't know what we can be."

"Why does that matter?" she says, softly, and oh, she's so romantic and sweet and naïve and he just wishes he could believe her. "We can be whatever you want us to be."

"We're not right, Victoire!"

"We feel pretty right to me," she says. It's not stubborn; it's not angry; it's not anything it could've been and it would've been much less painful if it had been those things, but it's quiet and honest and there is no way for them to be okay.

"Don't you care about what people will say?" he asks, a last ditch attempt to make her believe what he's told himself, the mantra he repeats to convince himself he doesn't want her, doesn't need her.

"I only care about you, you know that," she says.

"That's not true," he lies, "you care about your parents, and my parents, and all our cousins and our friends and they are all going to be mad with us."

"I don't care," she says, "I'm not changing us for them."

She looks so small and so pretty and she's right, of course - she's always right - because they are James and Victoire or Victoire and James and they can make it through anything because they are bound by some invisible force and they just have to accept it.

"We are about to enter a particularly dark period of our lives," he warns her, as though he knows more, as though he isn't hurtling at a hundred miles an hour into oncoming traffic and as though that thought doesn't terrify him in the slightest.

"It's always darkest before the dawn."

"Did you just quote Florence and the Machine at me?"

"Maybe."

He kisses her and lets himself believe for one glorious moment that perhaps they could be okay.

/

It doesn't take long to fall.

/

For a few weeks, James tries to carry himself with newfound confidence, and he tries to have the confidence he's currently pretending to have. His dreams change into himself and Victoire strapped to a wooden post and set on fire, the orange flames licking up their skin and leaving ugly welts on his Victoire, his perfect flawless Victoire.

What scares him the most is that the dreams don't scare him.

He feels himself slipping further almost daily, and Victoire never ceases to tell him that she's worried, that he's not okay, that he needs help. He doesn't let himself believe her. She's done him enough damage.

They drift apart; which here means, they continue seeing each other, they continue their physical relationship, but there is an intangible distance between them that nothing can broach. There are deserts in the inches between their skins. There are oceans in the emptiness of their voices as they say each other's names.

They argue, and all the old emotions - sadness and disappointment and confusion - are still there but the anger overcomes them all and things are thrown and hearts are broken.

"I can't do this any more," she says. Six simple words and everything James has been collecting, compacting together into one tiny ball of pain that lodges itself in his very being, explodes into a tiny fragments that stab into his bones and between the nerves in his brain.

James doesn't live. He barely even exists. He smokes. He drinks. He draws. He breathes, when he remembers.

Victoire loves.

/

It's not a surprise, really, when James is rushed into hospital with alcohol poisoning. She was always trying to get him to cut down. It's a nervous habit of his, she knows, and they were the thing making him most nervous, she also knows.

Victoire sits by his side and she silently thanks whoever decided that he should go to a Muggle hospital instead of St. Mungo's, because when the nurses assume she's his girlfriend, she doesn't have to correct them.

She waits. She waits for three days, counting his breaths and knowing that the position he is sleeping in directly correlates to the way their bodies curve together when she's sleeping beside him. She wonders how he would draw the details of the hospital, how his hands will shake when he wakes up, and whether it's down to the alcohol, the smoking, the drawing, or Victoire.

When he wakes up, he doesn't look surprised to see her. They both know that they have an unbreakable link.

"I missed you," he says, simply. She presses a kiss to his lips.

They don't talk about the fact that James was on the brink of death, or that they'd all but broken up. They just lie together, allowing their unsaid thoughts to fill the spaces between each other, interwoven fingers that symbolised family as well as romance.

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**a/n**: thank you for reading! please leave a review, especially if you're going to be kind enough to favourite. :)


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